Artifacts in Island Cave Push Back Arrival of Humans in the Pacific

Archaeologists successful West Papua recovered past histrion resin that they accidental is the oldest grounds of quality accomplishment successful the Pacific. The team’s research—published earlier this period successful Antiquity—describes hardened histrion resin from Mololo Cave connected Waigeo Island, portion of the Raja Ampat archipelago. Excavations successful the cave revealed chromatic artifacts, carnal bones, charcoal, and histrion resin, the past of which was important for timing the quality beingness successful the area.

“Some bones successful the deposit are apt natural, including smaller animals similar tiny rodents and microbats,” said Dylan Gaffney, an archaeologist astatine the University of Oxford and the paper’s pb author, successful a Phys release. “The different larger animals similar terrestrial birds, marsupials and megabats are much apt to effect from quality predation.”

The squad besides recovered the remains of marine animals—the teeth of carnivorous food and oversea urchins—in the cave, indicating the past quality occupants took them from the seashore (9.32 miles/15 kilometers away) and processed them successful the cave.

The histrion resin pieces the researchers recovered did not signifier naturally. According to the team, who described their enactment in an nonfiction for The Conversation, the resin was made by humans who chopped bark from a histrion and past snapped the hardened resin into shape. Though they are not definite however the resin was used, they speculate that it whitethorn person been a substance root for fires. Radiocarbon dating of the layers successful which the resins were recovered bespeak that humans were successful the cave arsenic aboriginal arsenic 55,000 years ago.

Exactly erstwhile and however humans migrated crossed the Pacific islands remains a substance of debate. In the past past, different hominins similar Homo erectus and the diminutive Homo floresiensis made their mode crossed the islands (some researchers believe that H. floresiensis is simply a miniaturized mentation of H. erectus). Though it’s precise apt that the Mololo cave was occupied by Homo sapiens, it’s imaginable that the assemblage was made by humans much intimately related to Denisovans, a mysterious radical of extinct hominins.

The ‘hobbits’ of Flores land went extinct astir 50,000 years ago, and this probe suggests aboriginal modern humans apt arrived connected Waigeo astir the aforesaid time, erstwhile the region betwixt Waitanta (the paleoisland that is present the chiseled islands of Waigeo and Batanta) and the paleocontinent Sahul was conscionable 1.55 miles (2.5 km) astatine its narrowest.

“It is apt that Waitanta was archetypal frequented by those surviving further westbound successful Wallacea, but it remains imaginable that humans initially entered Sahul via Australia and rapidly moved north-west, arriving astatine Waitanta from what is contiguous the Bird’s Head Peninsula of New Guinea,” the survey authors wrote.

The squad besides simulated the imaginable routes past humans could person taken into New Guinea by mode of the Raja Ampat archipelago. Now, they program to further analyse sites successful the archipelago that could clarify the nonstop timing of quality arrivals—and perchance the precise radical of humans who were there.